Yasuhiro Nakasone

Yasuhiro Nakasone (27 May 1918-) was Prime Minister of Japan from 27 November 1982 to 6 November 1987, succeeding Zenko Suzuki and preceding Noboru Takeshita. He was a member of the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, and his term saw the privatization of state-owned companies and the revitalization of nationalism in Japan.

Biography
Yasuhiro Nakasone was born in Takasaki, Gunma Prefecture, Japan in 1918, and he served as a paymaster in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II. In 1947, he gave up a promising career in an elite government ministry to run for the National Diet, entering the Diet as a member of the Japan Democratic Party. Nakasone's credentials as a right-wing politician were established when he brazenly delivered a 28-paper criticizing the US occupation of Japan to General Douglas MacArthur. In 1959, he became Minister of Science, and he then served as Minister of Transport in 1967, head of the Agency of Defense in 1970, Minister of International Trade and Industry in 1972, and Minister of Administration in 1981.

Nakasone became Prime Minister in 1982, and Nakasone and Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe improved Japanese relations with the Soviet Union and China. Nakasone also became close friends with President of the United States Ronald Reagan, seeking a more equal relationship with America, while also promising to be the USA's "unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the Pacific. Political opponents saw him as a reactionary and dangerous militarist, and he sought to keep Soviet submarines away from Japan, as well as to amend Article 9 of the Japanese constitution in order to give Japan an independent military. Nakasone's most notable policy was his privatization initiatives, which led to the breakup of Japan National Railways and 80,000 redundancies. Bureaucrats also lost their leading role, and he also advised the Japanese public to purchase foreign imports in order to create a good impression among Japan's Western trading partners. However, Nakasone was also known to be a nationalist, as he visited the Yasukuni Shrine, claimed that Americans were less intelligent than the Japanese, and supported historical revisionism in school textbooks. In 1987, he was forced to resign after he attempted to introduce a goods and services tax in a policy designed to cut the budget deficit. He remained in the Diet for another decade and a half, but his influence would wane until his retirement.